Willful Ignorance is the Ultimate Form of Privilege

How stupidity became a luxury good

In February of 2020, 64-year-old Mike Hughes died when his homemade, steam-powered rocket crash landed outside Barstow, California. The previous year he had reached an altitude of 1,800 feet in a similar rocket, but this time he’d hoped to hit 5,000 feet and prove the “theory” that the Earth is flat.

Two years later, Cirsten Welden died of Covid. She’d been a prominent spreader of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who told her followers that only “idiots” get vaccinated.

Hughes and Welden lost their lives at least in part because they espoused willfully ignorant beliefs. That qualification is important. Ignorance by itself is unfortunate, but not blameworthy. If you’ve had no opportunity to learn the facts, that’s not your fault.

But that’s not what happened in their cases. These folks could have easily learned the truth about vaccine safety or terrestrial geometry, if they had really wanted to. “Stupidity’s the deliberate cultivation of ignorance,” wrote the American novelist William Gaddis in his 1985 novel, Carpenter’s Gothic. And that’s what we have here. Essentially, Hughes and Welden died because they were stupid.